Volume 1, Chapter 5, The Social Structure of Virginia, Planters and Farmers
But if the royal governor was the leading governing power, de facto he shared the rule over Virginia society
with an oligarchy of very large tobacco planters who, as we have seen, were granted large tracts of choice river land
and who were able to command and exploit the labor of slaves and indentured servants for
their plantations. This ruling class of large planters permeated the officers of colonial
government. They constituted the entire council, the upper house of the assembly and supreme
judicial body, and a majority of the house of burgesses. In addition, they were the major
The next larger unit, the county, was ruled by several justices of the peace appointed by the governor from among the planters.
The justices of the peace held county court, administered roads and police and assessed taxes.
Orders of the county court were expected to be transferred to the county court by the governor,
but the county court did not accept the order and issued a decree.
The county court was then ruled by a court of law.
The Great Bulk of the Free Populous were not large planters, but small farmers with holdings of 50 to a few hundred acres. These were independent yeoman, who had acquired titles to the land they were to settle by head-right grant, or by the law of the land.
A few small farmers had one or two indentured servants, but most had none, the labor being performed by the farmer and his family.
Despite the rule of the royal governor and the preemption of choice land and the use of slaves by the large planters,
the yeoman enjoyed a far freer, more mobile society than they had ever known.
They were free above all from the hopelessness of the rigid feudalism and caste structure that they had left behind in England.
Here they were, at last, owners of their own land and products.
They were pioneers, hewing out their living from a new and untapped continent.
The bulk of Virginians in the colonial era made their living from the soil,
And so the society and the economy were almost wholly agrarian.
Even the few town dwellers were close to agrarian life and traded agrarian produce.
Scattered thinly over a wide area, the agricultural population used the rivers as the primary method of transportation.
Roads by land were poor and travel difficult.
Difficult. Even merchants were scarce, and the planters depended on English ships for
their merchandise. Far off London and Bristol were virtually their nearest market towns.
There they maintained factors as agents in trade. The poorer farmers were often served
by neighboring planters, who would thus function intermittently as middlemen in lieu of specialized
The wealthy planters were able to trade in quantity and to break bulk for the smaller farmers.
While the great export staple was tobacco, each of the large plantations functioned like the feudal manor.
Each was a nearly self-sufficient economic entity, producing its own food, clothing and shelter,
and importing large equipment and luxury items of consumption for the planters.
and Planters.
Tobacco production continued to grow spectacularly. American tobacco imported by England amounted
to £203,000 in 1624, reached over £17.5 million by 1672 and £28 million in 1688.
When tobacco production grew, its price naturally fell from six pence to a penny or less a pound.
As a result, the lot of the small tobacco farmers became increasingly difficult, and
they found it harder and harder to compete with the larger plantations, which were staffed
with slave and bond-servant labor. An increased use of slave labor after 1670 widened the
The ruling planters, naturally enough, aspired to the life of the English country nobility. As their prosperity improved, so did their culture and learning. In the colonial period, there was little of that aura of magnolia and roses, or of the pampered idleness, often attributed to the Virginia aristocracy. As we have seen, they were often deep in trade.
and the Virginia Planters had none of the traditional aristocratic contempt for hard
work or for trading. They were not securely wealthy enough to afford shirking the unremitting
task of managing their estates. They were, in short, not yet established enough in privilege
to assume an European aristocratic attitude toward business. Even the large planters could
not relaxed from their task of trying to make profits and avoid losses. Despite their privileges,
a life of idle dandyism would have led to rapid bankruptcy. Neither did the pseudo-heroics
of song and story abound and dueling was virtually unknown anywhere in the colonies. Increasingly,
the planters cultivated learning. They amassed home libraries of the best knowledge of the
The Great Virginia Planters William Byrd II
and later studied business methods in Holland and then was apprenticed to a firm of merchants in London.
While in London he became a friend of such leading writers as William Congreve.
Byrd himself wrote literary and scientific papers.
Back in Virginia, he corresponded with various English noblemen and amassed one of the best libraries in the colonies,
over 3,600 volumes and a handsome collection of paintings by English artists.
Books in birds and other libraries included works of law, science, history, philosophy,
the classics, theology, sermons, agriculture, indeed virtually every branch of learning
of the time. In addition to the birds, some of the other ruling planter families by the
For those who could not afford schooling in England, the scattered peopling of Virginia
made education difficult to come by. The planter would try to hire a tutor for his children,
and often several neighboring planters would jointly hire tutors. Often the teachers were
Early in the colony's history, King James and the Virginia Company tried to found a
school but their efforts came to naught. The first successful school in Virginia was founded
by the planter Benjamin Sims, who in 1635 left 200 acres and 8 cows for the education
The Eton Free School was established in 1659 in Elizabeth City by Thomas Eton with a gift
of 500 acres of land. These schools began a pattern of many private free schools founded
by wealthy planters of Virginia, generally in their wills. The schools collected
tuition from parents able to pay and admitted poor children and orphans free.
The schools generally taught the three R's and a little Latin.
Children on farms remote from the schools were taught, if at all, by their parents or
by the local parson.